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'All the complaints?' Stuart Monk of Jomast, Home Affairs Committee, January 2016

Last week a Parliamentary committee asked
one of Britain’s richest landlords to hand over the complaints his company had
received from its asylum-seeker tenants. “All
the complaints?” replied Stuart Monk, owner and managing director of Jomast.
“There’ll be a lot, there’ll be an enormous number.” [video here:
5.31pm to 5.33pm]

After the Times revealed that G4S and Jomast, its subcontractor for asylum housing in England’s North East, had painted the doors of
asylum seekers houses red, resulting in racist attacks and arson, the Parliamentary Home Affairs Committee summoned the
companies to Westminster.

StuartMonk, whose family
has an estimated wealth of £175 million, represented Jomast.
G4S put up Peter Neden, the company’s
regional president for UK and Ireland, and John Whitwam, managing director, immigration.

Monk was adamant
that as a businessman he was providing “a product suitable for asylum seekers”.
He claimed in providing asylum housing Jomast had “a track record second to
none”.

Members of the
Home Affairs Committee were less than impressed. Chuka Umunna, MP for
Streatham, said that the Jomast business model was pretty clear — “buying
cheap property in the most deprived part of communities, making a profit from deprivation
and people’s need for refuge”. Umunna called it “an unseemly and unsavoury” business.

So what is Jomast’s
true record?

Times lead story, 20 Jan 2016Jomast was
established as a family regeneration and property development company in 1972. The
company, which claims to be “a leading name in private sector housing provision and one of the
largest private landlords in the UK” was accused by The
Times of creating “apartheid on the streets of Britain” by painting
asylum seekers doors red in its asylum housing in Middlesbrough.

Jomast had built its domination of the asylum housing market in the North East by 2010 through
takeovers of smaller contractors, and outbidding most of the local authorities
and contractors like Clearsprings in the region, undercutting their bids for
extension of the asylum housing contracts.

Andrew Norfolk’s revelation in the
Times about those distinctive red
doors was not the first time the voices of
asylum seeker tenants had been raised in protest against Jomast and its
degrading housing.

In 2010 Jomast had added its own ‘mother and
baby market’ to the national asylum housing market with the development
of a former police hostel it owned in Stockton. By 2012 the hostel accommodated
thirty-two women and thirty-eight babies and toddlers. Despite the protests of health workers, social workers and the Safer
Stockton Partnership committee Jomast won
approval from the Stockton Planning committee.

The
hostel was in blatant disregard of key provisions in the Home Office policies
on dispersal — that there should not be concentrations of asylum seekers in
particular neighbourhoods and that women asylum seekers and their children should
not be housed and concentrated in known ‘red light’ areas of sex work and
prostitution.

Catherine Tshezi, who was dumped in
the hostel weeks after giving birth, said about her experience there: “This
really goes to show that the asylum seekers are not respected. We are all human
beings and we deserve
respect and dignity.”

The hostel, the first and the only one in the UK
asylum housing system at the time, resurrected
the world of punitive housing, back to the women-only segregated hostels of Cathy Come Home, and the
morally charged unmarried-mother-and-baby units that local authorities developed
in the 1950s and 1960s.

In interviews I undertook with women at the Stockton
hostel in 2012 they constantly returned to phrases about living in “cells”, in
conditions “like a prison”. They said there was no respect for their dignity,
privacy or different cultures.

Cha Matty, a former
housing worker, one of the women in the hostel who had been there a year with
her baby, said she was “shocked and disappointed at how we have been treated by
the powers that be. How inhuman they are treating us, and we are just
numbers for them in making a profit which is very unfair and sad”.

At the same time as Cha and another former resident of
the hostel were in London giving evidence, their local MP posted on his
website:

“Alex
Cunningham has today called for the Home Secretary to investigate the handling
of contracts for housing asylum seekers by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) which
impact directly on people in his Stockton North constituency.”

Cha’s reward for her whistleblowing was devastating – Jomast evicted
her and her toddler daughter into
local authority bed and breakfast and she lost her own financial support.

Jomast since 2012 has
continued to use the hostel and has also converted an adjoining property.
Jomast is currently facing opposition in Hartlepool for its plans to convert a
property it has bought there for conversion into another mother and baby hostel.

According to council minutes
quoted by the Hartlepool Mail, members “highlighted the high rate of sex crimes
in the area and felt it was not a suitable premises for the intended use”.

Forced
evictions and racist attacks

Stockton was not the only town where the Jomast brand
of landlordism shaped the asylum housing market. In Sunderland Jomast decided
throughout the summer of 2012 to increase the profitability of its asylum
housing leased from other small landlords by forcing some of its existing tenants in larger
accommodation to move out, sending them to Gateshead and replacing them with
single men forced to share bedrooms.

I spoke to former Jomast employees who told me of
eight cases of this kind. I interviewed an elderly disabled Congolese couple who
had been in asylum housing since 2008 and supported by Sunderland Social
Services in their accommodation for two years. They were given notice and
dumped in a Jomast flat in Gateshead twelve miles away where they suffered repeated
racist abuse from local teenagers.

In 2012 and 2013 I interviewed a Kurdish journalist
who had fled from attackers in Iraq and within a week had been dumped in a
Jomast house in an area of known Far Right activity in Sunderland. He and other
tenants came under attack from a crowd who broke the door and windows. Jomast
patched up the windows but refused to move him.

Back yard (Dorothy Ismail)On a couple of occasions at a Sunderland drop-in
centre I chatted with an Eritrean athlete who had fled his Olympic squad and
ended up in a squalid, dirty Jomast property visited by drug dealers and sex
workers. At the same centre I talked to a doctor who had worked with refugees
in South Sudan — she was dumped with her toddler daughter at the top of a run
down Jomast house with her daughter’s cot next to a cooker, and a filthy back
yard as a play area (picture above).

Early
investigations on ‘red doors’ housing

Investigations into Jomast properties in Stockton and
Middlesbrough for a BBC TV
North East programme, filmed in
late 2014 and screened in March 2015, exposed overcrowded damp and rundown
houses with forced sharing of bedrooms — and the red doors.

BBC reporters for the first time managed to get a
figure for Home Office payments to G4S/Jomast: £9.20 per night per asylum
seeker. The BBC team suggested that the return on Jomast investment in the
Stockton ‘red doors’ houses (using taxpayers’ money of course) rivalled the returns
expected on luxury properties in the Teesside countryside.

John Grayson, BBC TV Inside Out programme March 2015

A Home Office statement given to the programme
defended the use of taxpayers’ money saying that “for the price of a takeaway
meal” asylum seekers were being housed in Stockton. Andrew Norfolk in his Times
article suggests that Jomast are being paid around £8 million by the Home
Office this year for asylum housing.

Hovels
driving profits

Stuart Monk told MPs last week: “We’ve had
an exemplary record in terms of the provision of services.”

“Jomast has a major base in my constituency, and this
is not the first time that it has come under national media scrutiny for the
wrong reasons. I have visited some of the hovels that have apparently passed
the test as ‘decent homes’, driving huge profits directly from Government
contracts.”

No doubt the Home Affairs Committee will be inviting Stuart
Monk back quite soon. The chair Keith Vaz suggested that they were likely to be
launching a full inquiry into the COMPASS contract in the coming months.